Reader ✓ How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue ☆ Nick Mehta
Your business success is now forever linked to the success of your customers Customer Success is the groundbreaking guide to the exciting new model of customer management Business relationships are fundamentally changing In the world BC Before Cloud companies could focus totally on sales and marketing because customers were often 'stuck' after purchasing Therefore all of the 'post sale' experience was a cost center in most companies In the world AB After Benioff with granular per year per month or per use pricing models cloud deployments and many competitive options customers now have the power As such B2B vendors mus Customer Success has become the industry buzzword du jour In many cases large corporations are simply renaming their Account Management function; in other cases companies are hiring a Customer Success Manager and assuming job doneIn reality customer success is an evolving discipline and no one has all the answers and even if they did things are changing so rapidly that today's best practice may become tomorrow's failure This book is a good introduction to many of the core concepts of customer success and why understanding what success means for your customer is essential to remaining competitive in today's subscription economyThe book has a few major gaps First of all segmentation is purely on size of customer organization size of revenue from first sale; it doesn't address the fact that you might be serving multiple uite different customer types all of whom are in the long tail Additionally the book doesn't recognize that there might be several different actors in the play Success for the call center manager might be getting this new product installed and running within 90 days whereas success for the call center director might be reducing staffing costs by 5% while improving time to answer by 10% You have to know your customers at a reasonable level of detail in order to know what metrics matter to which of them and whyBut these points aside the book does a good job of introducing the concepts of measuring success by definable metrics keeping constant watch on those metrics and ensuring that every part of the organization understands that making things as easy as possible for the customer is key to survival in today's world Even organizations operating in apparent backwaters such as the manufacturing of heavy industrial euipment should study the lessons in this book in order to see a how to beat the competition by being customer outcome focused and b how to increase revenue opportunities by understanding the entire customer life cycle Today pre sales and after sales are generally uite different animals with different incentives and the customer is the one who experiences the gaps; tomorrow there should be a continuous coherent journey from initial discovery through to expansion and renewal but this can't happen unless the entire organization understands what parts play which roles in customer success and incentives are correctly alignedIf you expect this to be a how to do customer success playbook you will be disappointed There's a significant number of key omissions and some hand waving plus the usual business book generalities But if you use it to stimulate your own thinking about how your company can focus on making sure your customers come back for it's a valuable tool Just realize that we're in the early days of customer success thinking so your journey will likely be on or near the bleeding edge just like everyone else
Nick Mehta ☆ Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue Doc
Customer Success How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring RevenueNd the context that led to the start of the Customer Success movement Build a Customer Success strategy proven by the most competitive companies in the world Implement an action plan for structuring the Customer Success organization tiering your customers and developing the right cross functional playbooks Customers want products that help them achieve their own business outcomes By enabling your customers to realize value in your products you're protecting recurring revenue and creating a customer for life Customer Success shows you how to kick start your customer centric revolution and make it stick for the long ter This book is fantastic and really helped me see the bigger picture when it comes to the subscription based economic revolution that we are a part of It is a trend that had started a few years prior and will only continue to grow People these days prefer to 'rent' their services versus own outright and it is incumbent on organizations to deliver a high uality customer experience to encourage their clients to keep utilizing them Customers demand this type of treatment and will go elsewhere if they do not receive it More than anything I learned that the Customer Success arm of your organization cannot move mountains alone; this function needs to be front and center supported from the top down and regarded as a key element to overall success It must be resourced and supported just as any other revenue creation team must beI close this review with some advice once given to me by my grandfather that still and will always hold true 'Always give of yourself than people expect'